A stylistically bold drama set in the Australian bush, Kasimir Burgess's debut film Fell looks at a man's painful journey through grief.

It centres on a remote community of loggers, who use not just chainsaws and axes on the ground but clamber high into trees on abseiling ropes fired from a bow.

In a stand-out performance, Matt Nable (East West 101, Bikie Wars, Riddick) plays a caring father, Thomas, whose young daughter is killed in a shocking hit-and-run accident while they are camping.

He internalises the pain as the driver of a logging truck, Luke (Daniel Henshall from Snowtown), is jailed for the crime.

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Changing his appearance – ditching his business suit and glasses and growing a beard – Thomas moves to a logging town, takes a job felling trees and calls himself Chris.

This intense man of few words is seemingly waiting for the killer to get out of jail. And when Luke arrives back in town and starts taking care of his own daughter, who was born while he was inside, Chris edges into their lives.

Driving the drama is the intrigue of how the grief-stricken father will avenge his daughter's death.

Effectively keeping the drama contained and slow burning, Burgess has the two men – a father who has lost his daughter and a father who has found one – become a logging team and head deeper into the bush.

In other hands, Fell could have been a movie full of showy performances and emotional fireworks.

But Nable conveys strong emotion without histrionics, just as he did in the under-rated 2007 film about a footballer facing the end of his career, The Final Winter, which he also wrote.

He is a powerful presence for long stretches of the film without dialogue, as Thomas/Chris leaves his civilised life behind to return to a primal state.

The film was shot in the Yarra Valley outside Melbourne and rarely has the bush looked so vibrant on screen. Almost literally taking a leaf from Terrence Malick and Peter Weir's atmospheric films, Burgess deftly creates the bush's many moods: the wind roaring through the trees, mist hovering, sap seeping through bark, smoke rising and insects scuttling along branches.

The noted short filmmaker, whose awards include the Crystal Bear at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, has taken an admirably bold approach to his first feature.

It's a film that rewards attention and patience, as shown by the warm reception at the world premiere in the festival's competition.

Fell is the third Australian film in the competition for "courageous, audacious and cutting edge" cinema, after The Rover and Ruin. The competition winds up on Sunday with Bong Joon-Ho's Snowpiercer.